A Day in Montreal, Canada

While up at Lake Placid, we headed out to Montreal, Canada, a mere 2 hours away.  It was a very cold and snowy day, but we enjoyed driving around Montreal and visiting a couple of sites.  It was especially helpful that my sister spoke French, so we did not seem like complete stupid tourists.. even though we were since we didn't know where to go most of the time. :) 

Our first stop was the Jean-Talon market, where we visited the fromagerie for some yummy cheese, ate crepes for lunch and had Turkish Delights for dessert!

   

Then, we headed out to the Vieux Montreal to check out the Notre Dame Basilique.  It has been 15 years since I last saw this place and I forgot  how beautiful and unique this place was.

  

When we finally got our fill of beautiful architecture, we headed out in search of a good place for beer.  We wandered into a nice restaurant/bar called L'Assomoir.  It was kind of pricey, but we needed to warm up and ended up lingering for a couple of glasses of beer and plantain chips.  We ended the night by heading over to Boulevard Saint-Laurent in search of cheaper eats.  Somehow, we made a wrong turn and ended up in the more shady part of the street with sex shops and strip clubs.  But, once we headed in the other direction, there were many quaint little restaurants and shops.  We wandered for a bit in the cold, searching for a perfect place, but for a Friday night, the restaurants seemed to empty and not at all the boisterous, lively type of places we thought they would be.  So we decided to eat sushi, in Montreal.  All in all, it was a fun mini-adventure.  After dinner, we headed out for some coffee and went back on our merry way to the land of freedom fries, freedom poodles and freedom air. =P